now, if you could jimmy it into your brain

the sheer exaggeration of the other self, and call it your other persona, you are now on your way to become another Pessoa. but i, i, i, there is only one i. and there are no multiplicities of the self, (or perhaps the schizophrenia you claim to be having is a lame excuse for your hollow external), nor is having mpd that interesting, unless you happen to watch paranoia’s agent and the baseball bat sneakily delivering you towards truth (a metaphor my dear). period. stop for a while. and look at yourself. your surroundings.

there are about ten books scattered on this table; one the Quran (you still haven’t fulfilled your quota for today yet, maisarah), one magazine you haven’t the heart to read yet because all of it concerns the word dakwah, Oblomov (which is due tomorrow), Rilke’s new poems that you still are flipping without much enthusiasm, and his Diaries of A Young Poet that he wrote for Salome, Al-Attas’s book – still unfinished, and three other engineering books you care not to name. several notebooks, all scribbled in the first ten or so pages.

i am no narcissist, and the word becomes so awfully tedious these days. first time i heard it i was fourteen – anything greek seemed cool to assume. then slowly we grow up and people mature and vocabularies expand and pretense becomes the very air you breath in and suddenly such a name for a character of a novel becomes altogether a cliched idea. scoff scoff. everything then stales and pales and suddenly Fight Club is overused by men who think they have a taste for cult films. or liking Sigur Ros seems to be the in thing to put as a soundtrack in every single abstract unsteady handheld video you make with your expensive dslrs. or printing compiled half shitty stories or your facebook statuses in double a papers, stapled together, and give it some pretentious melayu-ed english with a seemingly ironic playword, seems to be so wonderful an idea you start to sell them for a dollar or two trying to convince yourself that you, are a writer, dear.

but of course, what are you doing?

-24th July 2012.